A fresh momentum
President Stephen C. Ainlay capped off orientation for roughly 560 first-year students in early September by highlighting a fresh “institutional momentum” during a speech at Opening Convocation, which also featured brief ceremonies for two prestigious awards.
The convocation marked the start of the College’s 213th year and also offered a chance to honor 636 Dean’s List students and confer two awards. The Stillman Prize for Excellence in Teaching was given to Rebecca A. Surman, an associate professor of physics and astronomy who has been at Union since 1998. Heidi Ching ’10, a sophomore pre-med student from Toronto, received the Hollander Convocation Musician Prize. She performed “Chromatic Fantasy in D Minor” by J.S. Bach on piano before Ainlay took the podium at Memorial Chapel to deliver his first Opening Convocation speech.
“I believe we are building institutional momentum,” Ainlay said. “But a claim of momentum is not a claim that we’ve arrived. We have ‘promises to keep,’ as Robert Frost wrote, and ‘miles to go before we sleep.’”
Ainlay cited success in a variety of areas. Annual giving increased nearly $550,000 during the last year, more than double the goal. The College endowment is ranked among the leaders among all institutions at $369 million, as of August. Admissions received a record number of applications, up by more than 500 from the previous year. And for the first time in history, there are more women than men in the incoming first-year class.
The president thanked those who helped develop the new Strategic Plan: “You’ve given us a critical tool that will allow us to attend to our deficiencies, focus our energies, and hone our educational mission.” He also urged participation in the ongoing meetings to discuss the plan’s implementation.
Ainlay listed a number of projects and changes set for the current school year. Among them, the newly renovated Social Sciences Building with two electronic classrooms; a new Minerva Office headed by Tom McEvoy, who will focus full-time on supporting the Minervas.
The president spoke of the opportunity to further integrate the liberal arts and engineering, a central differentiating element in the Strategic Plan. The Mellon Foundation has supplied an award that will cover a conference to develop integrative models.
“We have an opportunity to make an enormous contribution here if we seize the leadership role we’ve been offered,” Ainlay said. “This will undoubtedly be a theme you will hear more about in the upcoming year.”
Alumni art in ReView
Five Union College alumni artists exhibited paintings, sculptures, photographs and drawings at “ReView: Five Union Alumni,” an exhibit which ran through early October at the Mandeville Gallery in the Nott Memorial.
Gallery director and curator, Rachel Seligman, wrote in the exhibit’s guidebook: “The five artists in this exhibit walk a delicate line between abstraction and naturalism in their work, a balancing act which results in rich, dynamic works of art. The work of each artist involves the examination of our perceptions of the world, and our place in it. This exhibition gives us the chance to discover or rediscover these talented artists and to re-view the world around us through their art.”
Featured were the aerial photographs of Nori Lupfer ’03, the landscape paintings of Linda Fisher ’87, the oil-on-canvas work of Stephen Pentak ’73, the mixed media work of Dr. A.J. Nadel ’56 and the sculptures of Chester Urban ’93.
Nadel, a native of New York City, has been a practicing surgeon for more than 40 years and began to study painting in 1982. He has been a full-time artist since the late 1990s. Nadel has had solo exhibitions at galleries in New York City and elsewhere, and his work has been included in group shows nationwide.
Pentak, professor emeritus of art and a past associate dean of the College of the Arts at The Ohio State University, has co-authored two books: Color Basics and Design Basics. He has shown extensively across the United States and abroad. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Columbus Museum of Art.
Fisher also has displayed her work in solo and group shows nationwide. She has been an instructor at Snow Farm, in Williamsburg, Mass., since 1994, and now teaches at the Lake Placid Center for the Arts.
Urban, of Holyoke, Mass., has exhibited in group shows in Tribeca and the Bronx, and his work was recently reproduced in The New York Times.
Lupfer, who was a freestyle aerialist on the U.S. Ski Team and performed with Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, was awarded a Watson Fellowship in 2003 to study “Circuses and Stunts: Photography of Entertainment in Motion.” She has exhibited her work in Spain and Connecticut. Her exhibited aerial photographs were taken during the last 18 months during an expedition to update the Garmin GPS marine database.
Becker Career Center gets new leader
A former human resources leader and corporate recruitment officer at Rhode Island’s Bryant University became the new director of the Stanley R. Becker Career Center in early October.
Bob Soules helped lead the career services office at Bryant University during the last year and, before that, provided career counseling at Quinnipiac University and the University of Hartford. In 2005, Soules shifted into college career education after more than two decades in corporate human resources positions including a stint from 1996 to 2005 with the CIGNA Corporation, an insurance and health care company based in Connecticut with more than 30,000 employees.
That experience will help Soules provide students and alumni with insight and advice from an employer’s perspective. Soules earned a master’s degree in education from Springfield College in 2006 and brings to Union a fresh energy and new perspective on career education.
"We want students to end up with a job that they are genuinely interested in, that they are passionate about, so that it drives their natural curiosity. If that happens, they will work longer hours without realizing it, they will be much more productive, and the rewards will take care of themselves,” Soules said.
The Becker Career Center provides distinctive educational programs and services to assist students and alumni with their professional development. The Center’s Web site features a host useful links for students, alumni and parents. But the center’s educational efforts go beyond Web services.
“What we hope happens with our center is that alumni provide students with a realistic understanding of what’s going on out there in the marketplace,” Soules said. “Alumni are a valuable resource to the students. And many alumni want to assist students in their job search. When a graduating senior can network and do an informational interview with an alum, they are already ahead of the game.”
Soules, 48, relocated to the Schenectady area from Providence, R.I. with his wife, Patty. The couple have two sons, Mike and Brad, both graduates of Trinity College, and a daughter, Chelsea, a junior at Drexel University.
Parents perspective
I would like to take this opportunity to welcome all parents of first-year students and their families to the Union community. These are exciting times for us all as we watch our children blossom in the classroom, on the playing fields, and in other social settings offered at the College.
During the summer months, the Parents Program Office organized 11 receptions throughout the country, welcoming more than 25 percent of this year’s first-year class. I would like to thank parents and alumni who took the time to serve as hosts; they opened their homes to the newest members of the Union family; and to Lisa Mason, from the Parents Program Office, for organizing receptions from California to Boston.
This past year has been marked by success thanks to those who supported our Parents Fund, and the efforts of our chairwoman, Vivian Falco. Almost half of all Union parents made contributions to the institution during the 2006-2007 academic year. Your generosity allows the College to continue its mission of providing our children with the superlative education needed to be the leaders of tomorrow.
During his first year as president, Stephen C. Ainlay has positioned the institution for even greater advances in the upcoming academic year, and years ahead, by implementing a Strategic Plan for Union College. By building off the plan’s strengths and evolving with today’s ever-changing world, the plan will allow Union College to be a leader in educating students to be engaged, innovative and ethical contributors to an increasingly diverse, global and technologically complex society. Examples of the Strategic Plan can be seen with the opening of two newly renovated academic buildings, the Taylor Music Center and the Bioengineering and Computational Biology facility. This is only a glimpse of the many great endeavors on Union’s horizon, which are evident in the pages of this magazine and the enclosed President’s Report to the Community.
It should be a great year for all our children at Union. I hope to see many of you on campus and I thank you for all you do for Union College.
Warmest regards,
Karen Dumonet (Vanessa ’07 and Sebastian ’09)
Parents Association Chairperson